Unveiling the Community of Choice plan: Madison, Wis. consultant Rebecca Ryan talks about reactions to her plan "From Good to Great: Making Greater Lafayette a Community of Choice."

Community of Choice’s town/gown recommendations

About the report:“From Good to Great: Making Greater Lafayette a Community of Choice” is a quality of life plan commissioned by Greater Lafayette Commerce and written by Next Generation Consulting, of Madison, Wis. Among its recommendations, the plan calls for town and gown initiative that includes: • Create a University District Alliance, bringing Purdue officials, businesses, neighborhood representatives from both sides of the Wabash River and students to work on quality of life issues. • Persuade Purdue to hire a group of students to be liaisons with neighborhoods. • Host “pop up” town hall meetings, taking West Lafayette City Council members to campus and into neighborhoods where students live. • Expand Boiler Gold Rush, Purdue’s annual new student orientation, to include more events in Greater Lafayette, such as a Mosey Down Main Street festival. Read the report: For more on what “Good to Great: Making Greater Lafayette a Community of Choice” says about town/gown issues, along with Greater Lafayette’s comparisons to other peer college towns, download the report at jconline.com.

What you can do

To volunteer: Greater Lafayette Commerce is recruiting members for its new quality of life committee. To apply, go to GoodToGreatSignup.questionpro.com.Purdue student committee: For more information about the Student Commission for Community Development, contact Bobby Egan, of the Purdue Student Government, at bobbyjegan@gmail.com. Social media: For more conversation about the Community of Choice project, use the hash tag #LafCoC on Twitter.

In the spring of ’86, I asked the editor of the Boulder Daily Camera if I could stop by her desk after deadline and talk over my resume and my prospects at the paper. She told me to save the stationery.

Considering my OK-but-unspectacular internship in the newsroom, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course, Boulder, Colo., had everything I wanted at that graduation moment. Friends who still had semesters of work to do. Tons of skiing right around the corner. A view of the sun off of the Flatirons every morning. A thriving music scene. And that whole Boulder thing you have to feel to understand.

The editor looked me over and said, no offense, but she had her pick of people who loved that whole Boulder thing — and who had a ton more experience to boot. They didn’t call it community of choice back then, but I understood just the same.

That’s how I start the story when the question comes up: How did you wind up in Lafayette?

Rebecca Ryan, consultant with a Madison, Wis., firm, several times last week asked for a show of hands on how people got here. As she presented Greater Lafayette’s new Community of Choice plan, Ryan wanted to know where people fell in one of three categories: hometown lifer; a boomerang, meaning someone who left and came back; or a transplant. And if you’re a transplant, she asked, did you come for love or money?

Ryan was clear that the key to the quality of life plan adopted last week by Greater Lafayette Commerce will be how well the community speaks to its transplants — ones she said too often are on the verge of moving on.

For the most part, the story goes this way: Students are here for four or five years, then they head down the road — by choice rather than out of necessity.

There should be no guilt in that on the part of recent grads. And there should be no shame in it for the community, either.

“A lot of them tell me they want to go to Indianapolis. A lot say they want to go to Chicago. A lot of them have the opportunity to go anywhere,” said Claudine Meilink, a career counselor at Purdue and a member of the committee that worked on the Community of Choice project.

“If I were to ask them, ‘Would you want to stay in West Lafayette, Indiana, when these other places are knocking,’ you might get a maybe. I can tell you what they’re answer would be most of the time.”

The rest of the sentence goes a little like this: Somewhere else.

The reality is, that happens in any college town — Purdue included. But what Ryan stressed during the plan’s rollout last week was that when those Purdue grads take off, you want them talking up the town as much as the alma mater — not giving it an all-out “whatever.”

That’s not happening, according to the surveys done for the Community of Choice plan.

So how do you build that brand of loyalty on campus — “There’s not a person over here who says, ‘I hate Purdue.’ Purdue pride is deep,” said Meg Merdian, who graduated in spring 2012 — for the rest of Greater Lafayette?

It starts, for now, with a question: Want to work with us?

Merdian spent four years as the Girl-in-Black featured twirler with the “All American” Marching Band and now is a graduate student in organizational leadership and supervision. She’s also part of the Student Commission for Community Development, a voice-of-the-students offshoot of the Community of Choice plan that started organizing last week. But she was originally recruited by Mike Piggott, Purdue director of community relations and one of the instigators of the Community of Choice project, while she was working at a golf course over the summer.

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“He happened to be there and asked if I wanted to get involved in something that could be a big deal for students and for the community. Yeah, I would,” Merdian said.

“The fact that they’re interested in the students and made room for us is so great. That just doesn’t happen all of the time. It’s like we’re not at the little kids table any more. We’re eating with the big kids now.”

A place at the table doesn’t shift attitudes immediately. “I think Purdue and West Lafayette will always have a very slight reputation of being ‘the college town surrounded by nothing but cornfields,’ ” said Bobby Egan, a member of Purdue Student Government and one of the organizers of the Student Commission for Community Development.

What will it take to shift that town/gown view the way the new quality of life plan envisions?

Egan talks about encouraging a viable live music venue and an investment in a new brand of development that speaks to students while they’re here and to alumni when they return.

Meilink talks about better connections between students and the community through internships, resume-building volunteer efforts that have more than one-off expectations, and better marketing about what Greater Lafayette already offers but that is virtually invisible to a university community that willingly and happily sequesters itself in a red-brick cage.

And Merdian, who is toying with weaving the quality of life plan into her master’s work, talks about time.

“Nobody’s kidding themselves. This is a big project. It’s not going to be done this year,” Merdian said. “I mean, I’ll be gone in two years. And we’re talking generations.”

Generations in the average student life cycle means roughly every four years. And even the ones who are taking charge will be gone in a few years, at best. That’s a lot of work.

The new Community of Choice report makes a point of saying, “Greater Lafayette has a major university, but it is not a college town.” Student perceptions of Greater Lafayette, reflected in surveys done by Next Generation Consulting, are weak.

Greater Lafayette can’t offer a morning view of the Front Range. But it can work on the whole welcoming, open-ended vibe around town to help four-year residents find some affinity for the community. And Greater Lafayette can keep Purdue students in the mix by making sure that invitation to the big kids table stands — and then running ideas by them as partners instead of passers-by.

That apparently started in week one of Greater Lafayette’s serious quality of life quest.